MSE Foundry
As a materials science student, your first lab experience is in the foundry casting aluminum in greensand molds. You go through the entire process of wetting and sifting the sand, compacting the molds, and removing the hot parts. The pattern used to make the vintage stadium memorabilia (pictured above) was created nearly 100 years ago by a local craftsman. The MSE department isn’t allowed to sell any of the casts, so they allow students to make them and keep them (for free) every year. The Materials Science department is the only engineering department left at OSU that still has a foundry. It still has a lot of old equipment, created way before safety regulations were even a thing, as well as a lot of new equipment. One of the coolest things you will see in the foundry are the large induction furnaces that melt the metal. Induction furnaces use electromagnetism to heat up the metal, and it creates a pool of liquid metal that appears to be levitating, a pretty cool thing when seen in person.
Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis
As a materials science student you will also get to spend time at the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis (CEMAS). It’s a relatively new facility with millions of dollars of equipment including diffractometers for XRD analysis, scanning electron microscopes (SEM), and transmission electron microscopes (TEM). The construction of the facility itself was carefully thought out so as to limit any external interference with the microscopes, ultimately resulting in a center that houses some the highest resolution microscopes in the world.
Microscopy really brings out the beauty of materials science. The bottom image depicts an electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) pattern, an EBSD crystallographic orientation map, a TEM image of a grain boundary, and an SEM secondary electron image. Not only do these images look cool, they provide important data and are extremely useful in the characterization and study of materials.
Materials Innovation Space
Materials science seems to be a hot topic in the engineering world. The Ohio State University has invested in two relatively new facilities, CEMAS and Nanotech West Lab, to advance research and support innovation. Not too far away from these two facilities is a new startup looking to bridge the gap between academia and industry here at OSU. It’s called the Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence (CDME), and I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of its development as an undergraduate research assistant since the summer of 2016. I’ve been exposed to some fascinating technology, including a diverse collection of additive manufacturing machines (3D printers) which has been the area of focus of most of my work thus far.
I first found out about Nanotech West from my work at CDME. Inside the Nanotech building is the new Materials Innovation Space, a space dedicated to collaboration and brainstorming between students, professors, and industry partners. It’s a space meant to foster new and great ideas in a multidisciplinary atmosphere in order to advance innovation. It’s a brand new space, unveiled only a few months ago. But before the Materials Innovation Space was even a thing, myself and a bunch of fellow undergrads working at CDME were moving old cubicles out of what once was a large office space to use at the ever growing CDME. Later we found out that the old office was going to be transformed into an innovation space, and the people leading it’s creation wanted students working at CDME to design and create the centerpiece for the space. I knew they wanted us for the cheap labor, but they made it into a competition with money involved, so I was intrigued. I formed a group with my twin brother and a friend, and we created a design, pitched the design in the form of a video, won the competition, and were tasked with building what we designed. It’s still an ongoing process soon to be wrapped up, but the following video shows our experience thus far. The build begins at 2:40 in the video.